she was asked if smoking were not bad for her health. She replied: "You know, while in Vienna, I went to a special singers' doctor [who told me] 'it is the singing which is more dangerous than the smoking', and I smoke longer than I sing." In the mid-1960s, her taste for the operatic stage began to decline and she gave fewer performances. In 1970, her daughter Vesna Debeljevic, then 20 years old, suffered an aneurysm, after which Della Casa began to limit her engagements. Vesna had surgery and survived the operation, but with complications. Della Casa devoted more time to her daughter's recovery, even buying a house in Spain where the family could gather undisturbed most of the year, and gave fewer and fewer performances until her final performance at the Wiener Staatsoper, as Arabella on 25 October 1973. In 1974, she announced her retirement, aged 55. She was considered to have been at the height of her career and left her fans bewildered: "no explanations, no comeback, no masterclasses, no interviews, no private appearances". Vesna spoke movingly of her mother's "unceasing, limitless love" ("eine Liebe ohne Ende"). Della Casa died on 10 December 2012 in Münsterlingen, Switzerland. The Großes Festspielhaus flew a black flag on news of her death. Legacy Della Casa made several complete opera recordings mainly for the Decca label: her interpretations of Countess Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro (Erich Kleiber) and the title role in Arabella (by Sir Georg Solti) are regarded as among the finest recorded. She made the first commercial recording of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs (Karl Böhm) in 1953 for Decca, and many classical music lovers claim this recording to be the greatest available. Her Elvira, sung to perhaps the greatest Don Giovanni of his time, Cesare Siepi, is available both on CD and DVD. She recorded a memorable Countess under the direction of Erich Leinsdorf at the Met, starring the American bass-baritone Giorgio Tozzi in the title role. As an interpreter of lieder, she often performed with the German pianist Sebastian Peschko and Hungarian Árpád Sándor. She made several appearances in the acclaimed US television edition of the Bell Telephone Hour and appeared regularly on Swiss television, giving interviews and performances, as well as participating in game shows. In October 2007 and November 2008, Della Casa, members of her family and her colleagues agreed to be interviewed as part